EDITORIAL: A new state recovery office adds missing piece of storm-response puzzle

Sunday

Oct 21, 2018 at 2:01 AM

By passing the 2018 Hurricane Florence Recovery Act last Monday, the General Assembly took a huge step toward providing both immediate and short-term relief to the tens of thousands of North Carolinians who have lost homes, belongings, wages and hope.

Tapping the state’s $2 billion rainy-day fund, the legislature committed to spending at least $850 million on Hurricane Florence recovery efforts. More money likely will be needed from the state down the road, and we expect the legislature will come through. Helping suffering constituents not only is the right thing to do, it’s also good politics.

$850 million is a lot of money. It needs to be spent efficiently and in ways that do the most good for the most people. After Hurricane Matthew, it became evident that paying for storm relief is only one piece of the puzzle. The state needs to know, among other things, how, when and where to best spend the money.

In previous editorials, we argued that the state needs to have a permanent strategy and organization in place to respond to widespread disasters, such as hurricanes and the accompanying flooding that seems to be the new normal. To us, it simply seemed like common sense. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to build an effective disaster-response operation on the fly.

The Honorables must have agreed. They wisely used the 2018 Hurricane Florence Recovery Act to create the Office of Recovery and Resiliency, which will be part of the Department of

Public Safety. The legislation states that the “Office shall execute multi-year recovery and resiliency projects and administer funds provided by the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery program.”

The new law allows the director of public safety to assign current staff members to the Office of Recovery and also allows for 30 new employees to be hired for three-year positions.

The legislation continues: “The Office will provide general disaster recovery coordination and public information; citizen outreach and application case management; audit, finance, compliance, and reporting on disaster recovery funds; and program and construction management services. The Office shall also contract for services from vendors specializing in housing, construction, and project management services.”

The Republican majority in the General Assembly was quite critical of the executive branch’s handling of the Hurricane Matthew recovery, primarily in its lack of expediency in putting millions of federal dollars on hand to work, even as the need remained great. The governor’s office said a big reason for the delays was the lack of a good blueprint and human resources to respond to Matthew’s widespread damage.

The Office of Recovery and Resiliency will not solve every problem. Disaster response is complicated and every storm requires a different approach. Creation of the office, however, is a good and wise first step. It’s an initiative we’ve needed for a while -- at least since 1999’s Hurricane Floyd, we’d argue.

The Florence recovery will test the office’s effectiveness, and leaders must remain flexible and be willing to adjust its work, scope and priorities as necessary.

Let’s use the Florence recovery to perfect it … and then hope and pray we won’t need it again for a long time.

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